In the most recent edition of Dr. Walt Brown's remarkable book explaining his hydroplate theory, which is available for reading on line here (although you may enjoy reading the hardcopy, as I do, and wish to order one at his website here), Dr. Brown provides an extremely vivid and helpful analogy to help explain a major flaw in the tectonic theory that has been taught for the past thirty years as the "settled science" explanation for earth's geology.
The hydroplate theory provides an alternative explanation for the evidence we see on the earth around us (and beyond earth in the rest of the solar system as well), and one that is very different from the tectonic explanation. The tectonic explanation is basically "uniformitarian," meaning that it assumes that the same processes working today -- at roughly the same rate and strength that they are operating today -- could if given enough time create nearly all of the geological features we find on the earth, including the highest peaks in the Himalayas and the deepest submarine trenches in the Pacific. The hydroplate theory is "catastrophic," meaning that it argues that nearly all of the major features on earth were created by an unusual event or series of events which brought to bear forces that are entirely extraordinary and nothing like the processes that we see around us today.
Specifically, the hydroplate theory argues that these extraordinary forces were unleashed by a global flood of massive proportions, and that they acted at a rate and at a level of force that is magnitudes greater than the forces going on today. Dr. Brown provides example after example of features on earth that cannot be explained by ordinary forces operating at ordinary rates and magnitudes, even though supporters of the uniformitarian theories (of which tectonics is the most recent and current manifestation) argue that, given enough time, steady application of ordinary forces can accomplish almost anything.
In a footnote at the bottom of this page of his online version of the book, footnote 132, Dr. Brown discusses the fallacy that, given enough time, tectonic drift could and did lift up mighty mountain ranges including the Himalayas. He writes:
A tectonic plate of mass m moves with a velocity v. If all its kinetic energy were used to elevate the plate and no energy was lost due to such things as friction, how high, h, could the entire plate rise?
Today, crustal plates move at about 4 cm/year—the rate a fingernail grows. [See Figure 90 on page 167.] Therefore,
where g is the acceleration of gravity (or 980 cm/sec2) and 31,556,736 seconds are in a year. Even if just the central 10% of the plate rose, as in buckling or crushing, it would rise only 8.2 × 10-17 cm. Therefore, today’s velocities of crustal plates couldn’t possibly push up mountains.Could millions of years of steady, but slight, pressure of one plate on another eventually push up mountains? Not anymore than logs in a river’s log jam might steadily crush or buckle up over millions of years (assuming the logs did not disintegrate). Until the compression of one plate against another reaches a very high threshold—not even remotely reached by plate tectonics—the plates will not crush, buckle, or lift one iota. However the compression event, at the end of the flood, easily explains how earth’s major mountains were pushed up in hours.
Dr. Brown's inspired metaphor for the supposed action of plate tectonics -- "logs in a river's log jam" -- helps us to wrap our minds around the problem for the tectonic theory. If the river is only flowing at a very slow rate, it is not going to push the logs (representing the plates floating on top of the supposedly "circulating mantle") up into mountainous shapes, no matter how much time we give it.
In the image above, a photograph of a log jam taken around the year 1937, the men walking around on the floating logs are not at all concerned that the logs will suddenly buckle upwards into huge piles of vertical logs -- if they were, they probably would not be walking about on them. Nor will the logs slowly work their way into a vertical position over time, if the river continues to creep along at a "uniformitarian" pace. We would not expect to go back to this same river today, seventy-six years later, and expect to see a veritable mountain of logs piled up, unless a huge wave of water had somehow been released upon them in a "catastrophic" event of some sort in the intervening years.
This argument by Dr. Brown, supported by the laws of physics as explained in the footnote, is yet another powerful piece of supporting evidence for the conclusion that the plate tectonic theory is fatally flawed.
There are literally many hundreds of other pieces of evidence offered by Dr. Brown to support the same conclusion. Many of these have been discussed on the pages of this blog -- some of them are referenced below for ease of review by interested readers. In addition, I have argued that if the plates have been uniformly drifting at rates proposed by the advocates of the tectonic theory, precisely-aligned ancient monuments such as the passage mounds at Newgrange, the shafts of the Great Pyramid, the incredibly precise "windows" to specific sunrises and sunsets built into Stonehenge from many different angles, and the ancient megalithic temples on the islands of Malta (among many other ancient aligned sites around the globe) would no longer be so precisely aligned, and yet they absolutely are in every case (consideration has to be made for precession, but not for tectonic drift).
The next time someone tells you that tectonics has been absolutely "proven" and that catastrophic explanations for the geological features you see on the planet all around you are ridiculous and only "the stuff of legends" or "unscientific," just think about the log jam analogy, and perhaps ask what it would take to push a log jam of horizontal logs on a relatively placid body of water into a violently up-heaved mass. The answer is a catastrophic event.
Below is a selection of just a few of many previous blog posts detailing geological evidence on the earth that poses enormous problems for the conventional tectonic theory, but which the hydroplate theory explains quite well:
- "The Ganges Fan, the Indus Fan, and the Great Flood"
- "Back from the Great Central Valley"
- "Crinoids on Mount Everest?"
- "Were the strata of the earth laid down all at once, or over hundreds of millions of years?"
- "The Green River Formation varves"
- "Dinosaur dance floors"
- "Jellyfish fossils and the hydroplate theory"
- "What about earthquakes? Effect of Japan earthquake on earth's spin rotation supports hydroplate theory"
- "Salt domes"
- "Earth's big roll"
- "Palm trees discovered in Antarctica!"
- "Lake Vostok and the deep liquid lakes on Antarctica"
- "Extraordinary sediment deposit from Pakistan to Bhutan supports hydroplate theory"
- "The Grand Canyon and the Great Flood"
